JerseyBoy (5)

khalling wrote:

>>>They have done experiments…

Who are "they"? And, specifically, please what experiments are you referring to?

>>>where they have recreated similar condtions and amino acids very quickly develop.

Not when recreating actual pre-biotic Earth conditions. Additionally, even IF you had a bunch of amino acids, you have to put them into the right order to yield a protein . . . but amino acids do not self-sequence themselves into the right order to produce proteins; they are commanded into a useful sequence by means of the instructions encoded on DNA (and RNA). So amino acids by themselves — even assuming you could produce them out of thin air with an electrical discharge — don't mean that much. You need GENETIC INSTRUCTIONS to put them in the right order.

>>>So not sure where you 're getting the useless jumble of chemicals business.

From the facts of history, and the facts of biochemistry. Please tell me where you're getting your information from.

dbhalling previously quoted scientific american regarding computer programs by Richard Hardison that supposedly "randomly" generated phrases. Here is the program:

THE COMPUTER PROGRAM IN APPENDIX E IN "UPON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" BY
RICHARD HARDISON

10 REM 1984 R. HARDISON
11 PRINT "RANDOMIZING ALPHABET"
12 PRINT "WRITE HAMLET, KEEPING"
13 PRINT "SUCCESSES."
14 PRINT :; REM N-COUNTER: # OF TRIALS
15 REM T=COUNTER:REUSE "TO BE"
16 PRINT "SUBROUTINE TO
17 PRINT "RANDOMIZE AND SELECT"
18 PRINT "LETTER"
30 N = 0
40 FOR G = 1 TO 10
50 T = 0
60 GOTO 80
70 X = INT (26 * RND (1)) + 1: RETURN
80 GOSUB 70
90 N = N + 1
100 IF X = 20 THEN PRINT "T": IF X = 20 THEN GOTO 120
110 GOTO 60
120 N = N + 1
130 GOSUB 70
140 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT "O": IF X = 15 THEN PRINT : IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 160
150 GOTO 120
160 N = N + 1
170 GOSUB 70
180 IF X = 2 THEN PRINT "B": IF X = 2 THEN GOTO 200
190 GOTO 160
200 N = N + 1
210 GOSUB 70
220 IF X = 5 THEN PRINT "E": IF X = 5 THEN PRINT : IF X = 5 THEN GOTO 240
230 GOTO 200
240 T = T + 1
250 IF T = 2 THEN GOTO 460
260 N = N + 1
270 GOSUB 70
280 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT "O": IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 300
290 GOTO 260
300 N = N + 1
310 GOSUB 70
320 IF X = 18 THEN PRINT "R": IF X = 18 THEN GOTO 340
330 GOTO 300
340 N = N + 1
350 GOSUB 70
360 IF X = 14 THEN PRINT "N": IF X = 14 THEN GOTO 380
370 GOTO 340
380 N = N + 1
390 GOSUB 70
400 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT "O": IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 420
410 GOTO 380
420 N = N + 1
430 GOSUB 70
440 IF X = 20 THEN PRINT "T": IF X = 20 THEN PRINT : IF X = 20 THEN GOTO 60
450 GOTO 420
460 PRINT "N=";N;" KEYS PRESSED TO WRITE 'TO BE OR NOT TO BE'"
470 PRINT "FOR";G;" RUN(S) OF PROGRAM"
480 PRINT
490 NEXT G
500 END
510 REM IF THE PROGRAM WERE
511 REM WRITTEN TO INCLUDE
512 REM PUNCTUATION MARKS ETC.
513 REM THE PROGRAM WOULD
514 REM TAKE LONGER, BUT WOULD
515 REM STILL NOT BE PROHIBI-
516 REM TIVE
517 PRINT
518 PRINT "WITH 3000 RUNS, THE MEAN"
519 PRINT "# of trials=333"
520 PRINT "THE MEAN TIME REQUIRED"
521 PRINT "WAS .14 MINUTES TO PRINT"
522 PRINT "TOBEORNOTTOBE"

This program proves nothing about Darwinism and how mutation+natural selection — the twin causal mechanisms in Darwinism — are presumed to work in nature, in the absence of any intelligent guidance or intervention. Like all genetic algorithms purporting to prove how "easy" it is to sequence discrete elements into something meaningful, Hardison quite obviously FRONT-LOADS (i.e., inputs in advance of running the program) information regarding what the DESIRED END-RESULT or OUTPUT "ought" to be.

That's great. But it has NOTHING to do with nature! Under Darwinian assumptions, nature doesn't "front-load" its evolutionary processes. It randomly generates something and then selects it or rejects it; then it randomly generates something else, and selects it or rejects it! That's the Darwinian theory. The program above is something completely different!

What the above program does is to randomly generate letters — easy enough to do — and then follow an instruction that tells it IN ADVANCE, "if you randomly generate a 'T', hold onto it for future use." The language is:

"100 IF X = 20 THEN PRINT "T": IF X = 20 THEN GOTO 120"

Then Hardison front-loads some more, instructing the computer that if it should randomly generate an "O", hold onto it for future use. The language is:

"140 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT "O": IF X = 15 THEN PRINT : IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 160"

So first Hardison front-loads an instruction to the computer that IF it should randomly generate a "T", hold onto it; then, IF it should randomly generate an "O", hold onto it, too;

He does the same front-loading with the letter "B", thus:

"180 IF X = 2 THEN PRINT "B": IF X = 2 THEN GOTO 200"

The same front-loading for the letter "E":

"220 IF X = 5 THEN PRINT "E": IF X = 5 THEN PRINT : IF X = 5 THEN GOTO 240"

The same front-loading for the letter "R":

"320 IF X = 18 THEN PRINT "R": IF X = 18 THEN GOTO 340"

Excuse me, but this has nothing to do with the actual assumptions of Darwinism and how mutations would be selected or rejected by natural selection. Natural selection is presumed to work by selecting a mutation — some new genetic material that appeared by accident, such as a DNA copying error — FOR THE SAKE OF AN IMMEDIATE ADVANTAGE IN FITNESS. Not a "future" advantage in fitness that MIGHT give the organism an edge over conditions that don't yet exist; but an immediate advantage over conditions that exist NOW.

Look at the above program and imagine that Natural Selection were, in fact, guiding the process, and not Hardison. Let's start at the top:

The computer has a symbol-set of 26 letters (I would have added a 27th symbol, i.e., a space, as a symbol that distinguishes one word from another, but never mind). Suppose the random-number generator (numbers 1-26) randomly came up with X=20, i.e, a number that corresponds to our letter "T". Hardison front-loads the program, commanding the computer to retain it for future use (i.e., printing) based on the fact that he — i.e., HARDISON, not the computer! — already knows in advance that "T" is "fit". But if real Natural Selection were in charge of the selection process, why should it retain X=20? Based on what criteria? The computer in this program is selecting "T" as "fit" based on Hardison's criteria, not its own, obviously . . . but Harding is an "intelligent agent"! He's the writer of the program!

Take the next letter:

Suppose the computer first randomly generates X=26 ("Z"), then X=24 ("X"), then X=4 ("D"), then X=15 ("O"). Hardison has instructed the program IN ADVANCE to prefer X-15 ("O") to all those other choices; but if actual Natural Selection were doing the selecting instead of Hardison, why would it prefer "O" to "D"? The only reason Hardison prefers "O" to "D" is because he knows IN ADVANCE of writing the program that in English, the sequence "TO" is meaningful (i.e., is "fit"), while the sequence "TD", or "TZ" or "TX" is meaningless.

Suppose the computer picks "T" and "O", and is then instructed by its front-loading to retain X=2 ("B") if it's randomly generated. But look: to a computer, or any non-intelligent agent, "TOB" has no immediate "fitness" or usefulness. It only has FUTURE POTENTIAL use as the start of a desired target sequence like "TOBE"; but how would natural selection (if it were in charge, and not the program as front-loaded by Hardison) know that an "E" — not yet generated! — would form the useful "fit" phrase in English, "TOBE"?

Hardison — an intelligent agent — can know that in advance, but natural selection — presumed NOT to be conscious and intelligent — couldn't know it!


The only thing the above program proves is that IF natural selection were LIKE an intelligent agent (such as Hardison himself), then it could, in principle, randomly generate letters, and select them, one at a time, for FUTURE USE as meaningful phrases.

Very nice, but natural selection — by definition according to Darwinist assumptions — does not, and cannot, work that way.

TOBEORNOTTOBE has 13 letters. Without front-loading any desired, target phrase, the actual number of permutations the computer would have to sort through to find that one phrase is obviously:

26 possibilities for the first position (out of a total of 13 positions)

times,

26 possibilities for the second position;

times,

26 possibilities for the third position;

etc.,

for each of the 13 positions.

That's 26^13.

Converting to powers of ten (for convenience):

26^13 = 13*Log(base10)26.

Log of 26 is about 1.4

So 26^13 = 10^18

Or,

1,000,000,000,000,000,000

different 13-letter arrangements from a randomly generated alphabet of 26 letters.

I believe that number is "one-quintillion".

Wow. We finally found a number that's bigger than our national debt. (For the time being.)

What are the odds of finding the one phrase (omitting spaces) "TOBEORNOTTOBE"? Obviously, one chance in one-quintillion. Again, that's assuming random generation of the letters with no front-loading by the program designer of any desired targets.

Keep in mind, that there are other 13-letter sequences that are also "fit" in the English-syntax sense of "intelligible". For example:

WHOISJOHNGALT

An intelligent agent such as Hardison might decide in advance to front-load his program to retain "X=23" ("W") instead of "X=2" ("B"), because Hardison already has in MIND (a key word for front-loading, everyone: "MIND") the target phrase "WHOISJOHNGALT" instead of "TOBEORNOTTOBE"; but how could non-intelligent natural selection know that IN ADVANCE of choosing a letter for "fitness"? Obvious, it couldn't.

The moral:

These programs — known as "genetic algorithms", or GAs — don't prove what Darwin enthusiasts claim they do.

And last but not least:

It is interesting, is it not, that dbhalling did NO research on this matter. He simply assumed that if so-and-so wrote a computer program and claimed that it prove such-and-such, and the results were printed in a prestigious journal like SciAm, then it obviously must be true; ergo, no other arguments, proofs, research, etc., are necessary. Darwinism is true because some guy front-loaded target-goals for a computer program to aim at, and the results were printed in Scientific American.

Sweet.

>>>Posted by Robbie53024 1 day, 3 hours ago
I'm not going to go through your math,

Why not? I WANT you to go through my math.

>>>but will accept it as valid.

OK.

>>>You're assumption is that each mutation would need to be done serially, which is not true. Many could be done in parallel, thus shortening the timeframe significantly.

Ah! Then you have in mind some non-Darwinian mechanism! Excellent!

Darwinism insists on SLOW, INCREMENTAL CHANGE.

"Slow" means "slow."

"Incremental" means "step-by-step," or "mutation by mutation." And not just any mutation, but BENEFICIAL mutations — those that increase an organism's fitness — and the great majority of mutations are injurious, while others are simply "neutral", i.e., they don't injure the organism, but they don't increase its fitness, either.

And since the chances of an injurious mutation occurring are far higher than a beneficial one occurring, it's obvious that no organism can sustain lots and lots and lots and lots of "parallel" mutations, because most of them would be injurious SIMULTANEOUSLY and they would kill the organism.

If you want to invent a hypothesis in which many beneficial mutations happen in parallel over the course of a short period of time, that's fine — maybe things actually did, in fact, happen that way! But the point is that IF THEY DID HAPPEN THAT WAY, then it means that some sort of causal mechanism OTHER THAN DARWINISM was operating!

Do you see that? I'll repeat it for you:

Darwinism means: SLOW mutations (over many reproductive cycles, usually requiring many millions of years), as well as INCREMENTAL mutations (meaning one or two mutations that change only or two features of the organism so that it can still reproduce with others that haven't yet mutated, and then pass on its mutated genes to the next generation).

If you want to discuss DARWINISM, then we can do so. If you want to discuss SOME OTHER HYPOTHESIS, then we do that, too. But we should strive to keep the two hypotheses distinct.

>>>No complete fossil records? Nonsense…

I didn't write that there were no "complete" fossil records. I wrote exactly what Stephen Jay Gould and others admitted to: that the fossil record shows mainly STASIS (i.e., no change) punctuated by sudden, rapid appearances of new body-plans, with NO intermediate fossil forms connecting the earlier and later body-plans. Are there some exceptions? Yes. Are they EXCEPTIONS? Yes. Are they the USUAL CASE? No. What is the usual case? STASIS punctuated by SUDDEN CHANGE.

The Darwinian hypothesis of slow, incremental change was based on what Darwin HOPED to find in future digs, not what has, in fact, been found.

Therefore, the fossil record does not lend strong support to Darwinism.

>>>You know, JB, it takes considerable effort to write such a detailed explanation of a complex scientific concept.

dbhalling never put "considerable effort" into any of his posts. He web-surfs and looks for any article on Wikipedia that appears to support his position and then posts it.

>>>>Equally disturbing to me is that after several turns at each other I still have no idea what you believe the truth to be.

That's because 1) what I believe "the truth" to be is irrelevant to this thread, which has been dealing with what I believe the truth NOT to be. The truth is NOT Darwinism. I hope that's clear enough.

>>> I've only heard contradiction and evasion. You espouse neither evolution nor creation? You are not a deist? If evolution is neither random nor deliberate - what is there? Is there a third option? If so I haven't heard you describe it.

I must apologize. It seems you're intellectually denser than I thought. Be patient with me. I'll try once more:

When you're in a court of law, the defense does not have to prove "the truth" of "Who actually perpetrated the crime." Did you know that? The defense doesn't know who, in fact, committed the crime, and it doesn't have to know. The defense doesn't have to care. All the defense has to do to defend its client is DISPROVE the prosecution's argument (or at least, cast enough doubt on it to encourage the jury to believe that there's "reasonable doubt").

Same with other kinds of logical arguments, not just legal ones.

I don't have to know who or what created life. I don't have to know who or what caused life, after it appeared, to vary into all the species that existed yesterday and all the species that exist today. I don't have to believe anything one way or the other. I merely have to consider the logical arguments provided by Darwin and his followers and point out the fatal flaws in them.

And guess what, ZeroIQ? No one knows the truth regarding this issue. Ayn Rand didn't know it (though it does appear she was a Darwin skeptic). Leonard Peikoff doesn't know. Harry Binswanger doesn't know. Peter Schwartz doesn't know. Diane Hsieh doesn't know. The drunks at "SOLO" and "Objectivist Living" don't know. The hallings of Colorado don't know. And you don't know. So why do you ask dumb-ass questions like "what do you believe the truth to be"? It's a stupid question because no one knows. I only know what the truth is not.

>>>Lastly, what of my point about how the entire scientific world embraces this idea.

I'll tell you what of it. You're ignorant of the facts, that's what of it.

http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org

STATEMENT: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

"I found it important to sign this statement because I believe intellectual freedom fuels scientific discovery. If we, as scientists are not allowed to question, ponder, explore, and critically evaluate all areas of science but forced to comply with current scientific orthodoxy then we are operating in a mode completely antithetical to the very nature of science."
Dr. Rebecca Keller, Biophysical Chemistry

"Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology." . . ."We know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others. The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions. They've never asked scientifically, can random mutation and natural selection generate the information content in living things."
Dr. Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook

"Darwinian evolution — whatever its other virtues — does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology.". . . "Scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these as well. … Many of the scientific criticisms of which I speak are well known by scientists in various disciplines, including the disciplines of chemistry and biochemistry, in which I have done my work."
Dr. Philip S. Skell, Member National Academy of Sciences, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University

"The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems."
Dr. Vladimir L. Voeikov, Professor of Bioorganic, Moscow State University; member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

"Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when handwaving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts. However, what we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection's ability to create complex biological systems - and we still have little more than handwaving as an argument in its favour."
Professor Colin Reeves, Dept of Mathematical Sciences Coventry University

"As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry -- and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far. It is only when an intelligent agent (such as a scientist or graduate student) intervenes and "tweaks" the reactions conditions "just right" do we see any progress at all, and even then it is still quite limited and very far from where we need to get. Thus, it is the very chemistry that speaks of a need for something more than just time and chance. And whether that be simply a highly specified set of initial conditions (fine-tuning) or some form of continual guidance until life ultimately emerges is still unknown. But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area."
Edward Peltzer
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)
Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry

As a biochemist and software developer who works in genetic and metabolic screening, I am continually amazed by the incredible complexity of life. For example, each of us has a vast 'computer program' of six billion DNA bases in every cell that guided our development from a fertilized egg, specifies how to make more than 200 tissue types, and ties all this together in numerous highly functional organ systems. Few people outside of genetics or biochemistry realize that evolutionists still can provide no substantive details at all about the origin of life, and particularly the origin of genetic information in the first self-replicating organism. What genes did it require -- or did it even have genes? How much DNA and RNA did it have -- or did it even have nucleic acids? How did huge information-rich molecules arise before natural selection? Exactly how did the genetic code linking nucleic acids to amino acid sequence originate? Clearly the origin of life -- the foundation of evolution - is still virtually all speculation, and little if no fact.
Chris Williams, Ph.D., Biochemistry Ohio State University

For list of over 700 scientists in the scientific world who have not embraced Darwinism, see PDF download:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/...

See this statement from a well-known chemist in the field of nanotechnology, James Tour:

http://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/th...

Bye, ZeroIQ. You're too much of a waste of my valuable time. I've posted short; I've posted long. I've posted math arguments; I've posted verbal arguments. I've responded to overall positions regarding Darwinian evolution; I've responded to specific points (e.g., the Miller experiment regarding amino acids, as well as the billions of years it supposedly too life to appear). I'm not going to waste more time by responding to every data-dump, and out-of-date Wikipedia article posted by poseurs like dbhalling.

If you still require clarification on any of these issues, try actually reading my posts.

>>>You are neither ignorant nor unintelligent but you do seem to be intellectually dishonest - not to mention pretty damn rude.

Well, Holy shit! The pot calling the kettle black! As a group, Objectivists are the rudest SOBs around, and when they get it right back at them, boy do they run and cry "foul!" Here's my intellectually honest (and most diplomatically polite) answer to your idiotic remark:

Tough.

>>>You say:
"dbhalling, et al., keep bloviating on the idea that Darwinian evolution isn't a problem because, after all, "we have billions of years""

That's correct. "Billions" are only 10^9. The exponents are puny compared to those of the sequence combinations that have to be sorted through by natural selection, mutation-by-mutation. I've already done an informal math example.

>>>In fact DB went to some effort to show that geological time scales would not be necessary. He (She?) gave respectable citations and did a very creditable job of laying it out in clear detail.

DB is a "he", but only in a grammatical sense. Anatomically, he has no balls.

You want me to debunk all the wikipedia data-dumps dbhalling posts? No problem. Just let me know specifically which ones. I gave concise counter-arguments. For example, dbhalling cited the Miller experiment; I countered with the fact that Miller was debunked by other scientists immediately after he published his results, and that as a consequence, he retracted his conclusions. I noticed the deafening non-response to that by dbhalling and you.

>>>you chose pull out only the first sentence - that agreed with your objection - then ignored all the rest which explained how natural selection was not based on pure chance.

I pointed out that Natural Selection won't save the Darwinian hypothesis because it must still wait around for chance mutations to occur — and then after it accepts or rejects a chance mutation, it has to wait around for the next chance mutation to occur; and the odds of the first chance mutation still have to multiplied by the odds of the second chance mutation — because (sorry!) that's how probability works: you multiply the fractions to get the odds of both chances occurring. So even if natural selection were to work like a perfectly deterministic mechanical clock, it must still WAIT FOR CHANCE TO COME UP WITH MATERIAL FOR IT TO SELECT OR REJECT. So despite the hoopla over natural selection, and how mechanically deterministic it is presumed to be, the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution rests ultimately on a base of random mutation — chance.

I also quoted Colin Patterson (British paleontologist) admitting natural selection has no causal power in evolution; it doesn't "cause" things to change — mutations do the changing. Natural selection simply sifts through the changes. And he admitted that no one has ever observed natural selection causing evolutionary change. You can argue with him, if you like. (He's dead, but don't let that stop you.)

>>>Even if you felt DB's point was flawed you certainly couldn't say his(her?) position was "we have billions of years".

You're blind. Look again at db's first post. The very first statement was, "1) It took almost a billion years after the formation of Earth for life to appear…"

And my carefully considered response to that was: So what. Billions of years are only 10^9; an exponent that is minuscule compared to the number of base-pair combinations that must be sorted through in a trial-and-error fashion. Even the simplest free-living organism yet discovered has 580,000 base pairs in its DNA. If natural selection had to sift through all possible combinations of those base pairs — around 10^340,000 — then there's obviously not enough time to do it in, even if we generously assume for the sake of argument that the organism's DNA is mutating once per second (which, of course, in reality, it isn't). So if life really did appear so soon after the formation of the Earth, the process by which it did so must have been non-Darwinian.

ero: That's OK I guess - we all have the right to believe whatever we want.

Very true. You choose to believe in unobserved "Just So" stories about species slowly morphing into other species (and by "species", I don't just mean small changes in variety, breed, or race; I mean big changes in overall body plan architecture) — a story that remains not only unobserved, but which results in mathematical absurdities when one performs even the simply calculation of the probability of such an event occurring.

The simplest free-living organism yet discovered is called "mycoplasma genitalium", which has about 470 genes, comprising 580,000 base pairs (pairs of nucleotides — A, C, T, G — in its DNA). You can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation right now:

The helical spine of DNA is a simple sugar called ribose, which imposes NO chemical restriction on the order of bases. In any one of those 580,000 positions along MG's DNA, the bases COULD (in principle) appear in any order, in any particular position. In position 1, there could be, in principle, an A, or a C, or a T, or a G. Same for positions 2 thru 580,000.

The order of the bases along the ribose double-helix symbolically represents code-words (each word being 3-letters long) which instruct another organelle in MG to look for amino acids and glue them together (using peptide bonds) in a certain order. The ORDER of the amino acids is crucial to forming a useful protein for the organism, in the same way that the ORDER of letters is crucial in the game of Scrabble to forming useful English words: "R-E-A-S-O-N" has the same letters as "N-R-S-A-O-E", but their sequences differ, which is what makes the first sequence useful (i.e., a real, meaningful word) and the 2nd one gibberish. Same with amino acids.

The amino acids are instructed to sequence a certain way because of the prior sequence of nucleotide bases in DNA.

Let's see the kind of mathematical miracle you're unwittingly counting on to make life occur:

Since an A, C, T, or G can occupy any one of those 580,000 positions, the odds of any one of them occupying, e.g., position 1 are one-in-four (A or C or T or G), or 1/4. The odds of A, C, T, or G occupying position 2 are also 1/4, so the odds of A, C, T, or G occupying BOTH positions 1 AND 2 are 1/4 x 1/4 = 1/16.

Since the odds are the same for each of the 580,000 positions, the TOTAL probability of any particular sequence — including a useful, function one — is 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 . . . n, where n=580,000. This equals,

1/4^580,000.

Converting to powers of 10 for convenience,

4^580,000 = 580,000 x log(base10)4

log(base)4 = 0.6

580,000 x 0.6 = 340,000

So 4^580,000 = 10^340,000, and

1/4^580,000 = 1/10^340,000

That fraction is so close to your name — zero — that it is effectively zero. Even if MG were to mutate its nucleotide bases 1-per-second, there are only 10^17 seconds since the universe began (assuming the Big Bang theory to be correct).

Just compare the exponents, OK?

You have a space of 10^17 (seconds) during which time you plausibly need to search (by means of a classical "random walk") through approximately 10^340,000 different combinations of sequences until you hit upon a lucky one that works (i.e., will actually code for a sequence of amino acids that will actually result in a protein that furthers the organism's life).

Sorry. But as I pointed out in an earlier post, you've run out of time.

dbhalling, et al., keep bloviating on the idea that Darwinian evolution isn't a problem because, after all, "we have billions of years". But even 14 billion years — the assumed age of the universe — is only 10^17 seconds, which is not nearly long enough for 10^340,000 possible combinations of something to be randomly sifted through.

As I said: YOU choose to believe in mathematical miracles. I don't.

Zero: So you are a deist - like myself.

I never said I was a deist. I merely claimed to be a Darwin Skeptic — a "post-Darwinian" — and a disbeliever in mathematical miracles. How does that make me a deist?

Zero: There is the both the Theory of Evolution - and the observable Fact.

Quite so. However, since a true "theory" must at some point rely on observable fact, I don't believe Darwinism rises (yet) to the status of a true "theory". At most, it's a hypothesis.

Zero: The former seeks to explain the process by which the latter has clearly taken place.

More than that. A "theory" is NOT just a "plausible story or imagined scenario"; it must also have some PREDICTIVE power — establishing some truly general or universal law, into which one can plug some variables, and then predict with high accuracy the result. And, a true theory must also have some RETRODICTIVE power — after establishing the general law, one can explain with a high decree of confidence (MATHEMATICAL confidence, not just a "feeling" of confidence) what past events occurred. There's nothing remotely approaching any of that in Darwinism.

But a HYPOTHESIS can be simply an educated guess, or an imagined scenario. Nothing wrong with that, since that's often how true theories begin. "Darwinism" is a HYPOTHESIS, not a THEORY.

Zero: Anyplace on Earth, anywhere you dig into the layers of rock, (or, more easily, anywhere the layers have been thrust up) we see that life has not always been the same.

True. And that was always know, even well before 1859 when Darwin published "The Origins of Species." For many people, the word "evolution" simply means "change over time: things used to be X, and today they are Y." But Darwin hypothesized a materially causal connection between the states of X and Y. He said, "X underwent small, incremental, random mutations over geologically long periods of time, and natural selection sifted through those small changes to arrive at Y." THAT's the actual idea of "They Darwinian hypothesis of evolution."

Zero: Dig deeper and it's glyptodonts. Deeper still mammals turn to shrews and T-Rex's appear.

Sorry to be a stickler, but did you notice the bias in your language? "Mammals TURN TO shrews…"? Not so. We observe nothing actually "turning to" anything else. We observe fossils X on an upper strata, and fossils Y on a deeper strata . . . .almost always with NO INTERMEDIATE FORMS OF FOSSILS BETWEEN X AND Y.

Even hardcore pro-Darwinians like Stephen J. Gould admit this fact. The fossil record shows mainly long periods of NO CHANGE ("stasis") punctuated by sudden leaps to new forms. That fact is completely inconsistent with Darwinian assumptions and expectations.

Zero: So then, is it your position that our creator simply changes his mind on a pretty regular basis?

I don't understand your point. You seem to be saying that IF we assume the existence of a Creator, it must follow that He, She, or IT would never change His, Her, or Its intentions about anything. Why would that follow?

db: "There are so many false statements in this comment that I don’t know where to start."

Judging by your previous posts on various topics, that's easily explained by two salient facts that I've noticed about you: 1) you're ignorant of the subject matter, and 2) you bullshit a lot.

db: "1) It took almost a billion years after the formation of Earth for life to appear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of...... "

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Evidence points to biological organisms going back as far as 3.8 billions years. That leaves about 700 million years for so-called "chemical evolution" to occur.

Too bad for you, but any number with a measley exponent of "8" is TOO LOW for a probabilistic random-walk to search through the possibilities to create an information-storage molecule like DNA. Also, it would have to be DNA first, not amino acids, because amino acids by themselves are simply like wooden Scrabble squares: the need to be SEQUENCED into the biochemical equivalent of words — that is, functional proteins — in order to do anything. The amino acids are INSTRUCTED to sequence in a certain order by means of DNA, so DNA would have to appear first . . .

. . . and unfortunately, this scenario doesn't work either! DNA has a backbone of sugar — ribose — that is VERY difficult to synthesize in the laboratory, and highly unlikely to occur by itself in nature without intelligent intervention by the lab technicians. The way ribose is actually produced in the cell is by the much more efficient means of an enzyme . . . but an enzyme is a kind of protein! And proteins require the PRIOR existence of DNA to instruct their amino acids how to sequence functionally!

So it's chicken-and-egg: DNA requires enzymes and other proteins for its creation and maintenance; but enzymes and proteins require DNA for their creation. This paradox has not been solved.

db: "2) Actually it takes amino acids very little time to form under the conditions of early Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%8......


I'll bet you didn't know, for example, that Miller RETRACTED his conclusions when it was pointed out to him by geochemist colleagues that the sort of gases he used in his experiment DID NOT comprise the early atmosphere of Earth. Whoops!!!


Miller **intentionally chose** gases that he already knew **in advance of actually performing the experiment** were "REDUCING", i.e., they easily part with their electrons, which can then be used to catalyze the reactions necessary for condensing a few essential amino acids out of the atmosphere (the reaction being jump-started by electric discharge).

Hey, guess what happened when Miller repeated his experiment using a combination of gases that actually *did* comprise the early atmosphere...

Nothing. Instead of amino acids, he got a tarry residue known as "sludge."


Sorry. But life on Earth did not begin (and could not have begun) by lightning discharging through a "reducing" atmosphere, which conveniently showered the land with amino acids. There WAS NO reducing atmosphere on Earth.




db: "From Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...... Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance."


Thank you. I've been posting that for years, and this was, in fact, proven mathematically beyond any shadow of a rational doubt in 1962 by mathematicians and computer scientists (e.g., Murray Eden of MIT, Stanislaw Ulam of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Marcel Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, et al.) at a famous symposium held specifically on that topic — "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo­Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution" (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5) — and chaired by Nobel Laureate (in medicine) Sir Peter Medawar, who made the following opening remarks:

"[T]he immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory. ... There are objections made by fellow scientists who feel that, in the current theory, something is missing ... These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we are having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them."


Murray Eden (a professor electrical engineering at MIT) made this comment:


"[A]n opposite way to look at the genotype is as a generative algorithm and not as a blue-print; a sort of carefully spelled out and foolproof recipe for producing a living organism of the right kind if the environment in which it develops is a proper one. Assuming this to be so, the algorithm must be written in some abstract language. Molecular biology may well have provided us with the alphabet of this language, but it is a long step from the alphabet to understanding a language. Nevertheless a language has to have rules, and these are the strongest constraints on the set of possible messages. No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones. I would conjecture that what one might call "genetic grammaticality" has a deterministic explanation and does not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation." (Murray Eden, "Inadequacies as a Scientific Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 11)


Stanislaw Ulam (a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, and later, resident at the Institute for Advanced Study) wrote:


"[I]t seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent." (Stanislaw M. Ulam, "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21)


Marcel Schutzenberger (a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris) wrote:


"We do not know any general principle which would explain how to match blueprints viewed as typographic objects and the things they are supposed to control. The only example we have of such a situation (apart from the evolution of life itself) is the attempt to build self-adapting programs by workers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their experience is quite conclusive to most of the observers: without some built-in matching, nothing interesting can occur."


And regarding chance mutation plus natural selection, Schutzenberger wrote:


“...there is no chance (<10-1000) to see this mechanism appear spontaneously and, if it did, even less for it to remain.... Thus, to conclude, we believe there is a considerable gap in the Neo­Darwinian Theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology."


(Marcel Schutzenberger, "Algorithms and Neo-Darwinian Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 75)


Additionally, eminent British biologist, L. Harrision Matthews wrote the following in his introduction to Darwin's "Origin of Species":


"In accepting evolution as a fact, how many biologists pause to reflect that science is built upon theories that have been proved by experiment to be correct, or remember that the theory of animal evolution has never been thus proved?.... The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof."
("The Origin of Species", 1976, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, pages x, xi.)


But I see you're praying frantically for Natural Selection to make magic happen for you. It won't work. Consider the following:


1. Natural Selection is a tautology; logically true by definition, but scientifically empty. "Organism X was chosen by Natural Selection to survive because its mutations make it more fit for its environment than its competitors. How do we KNOW it was, in fact, "more fit" than its competitors? Well, because Natural Selection chose it to survive."


Organism X survived because it was "fit"; and we know it was "fit" because . . . it survived! Just plain dumb.


Psssssstttttt! In order for this kind of statement NOT to be a vacuous tautology, there must be some INDEPENDENT criterion of "fitness" OTHER THAN the obvious fact that it survived. You must be able to identify "Factor ???" in the organism and say IN ADVANCE of anything else happening, "Yes, I see that this organism has Factor ???, which **WILL** cause Natural Selection to select it for continued survival," and you have to be able to identify Factor ??? BEFORE NATURAL SELECTION HAS DONE SO." Then you can verify whether or not "Factor ??? CAUSES (or makes it likely that) natural selection will select this organism over other organisms that lack Factor ??? for continued survival. If you wait until AFTER natural selection has supposedly selected the organism for survival, then you will merely attribute the fact of the organism's survival to whatever your bias happens to be that afternoon — "It has the right kind of teeth for eating the right kinds of seeds . . .", "it has just the right kind of fins that allow it to swim a bit faster for hunting prey than its competitors," etc., etc. In fact, you have no idea of WHY the thing survived at all; you only know the end-result, which is that it has, in fact, survived. By giving a name to this fact — "Natural Selection" — you are REIFYING a given, and pretending that you have CAUSAL KNOWLEDGE of WHY it survived, when, in fact, you have NONE.


2. According to paleontologist Colin Patterson (British Museum of Natural History), natural selection has NEVER been observed to have the ability to cause things to evolve:


"No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question."
("Cladistics", Interview with Brian Leek, Peter Franz, March 4, 1982, BBC.)


3. According to Darwinian dogma, Natural Selection does not *initiate* change; it selects and preserves change *once mutation has provided such change*. So natural selection must wait for mutations to appear — and mutations, according to the same Darwinia Dogma, must by random: the switching-on of some latent capability already encoded within the organism's genotype is NOT an example of a Darwinian random mutation since the change was already in existence in latent form. A Darwinian RANDOM mutation is one that is not already in existence in the genotype, but occurs spontaneously because of some equally random event: a DNA copying error; a stray cosmic ray causing some small damage to the genome, etc.


Thus, since natural selection depends first on some random event (a mutation), and then must wait for the next random event (another mutation), etc., ad infinitum, all of this talk by Scientific American, or Richard Dawkins, et al., that "evolution is not *really* random; it occurs NECESSARILY because of *natural selection*" is, quite simply, bullshit, obfuscation, and denial.


Natural Selection, by the Darwinian's own definition, must first WAIT for chance to operate in order to have something to select; ergo, evolution clearly proceeds BY CHANCE.


Modern Darwinbots don't like to admit this because enough calculations have been done by enough people in different disciplines — mathematics, computer science, information theory, engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, etc. — to prove that "chance" doesn't have a chance at producing life.


So "chance" doesn't work, and "natural selection" is a tautology (thus, vacuous from a scientific point of view) and which, in any case, must first wait for chance (which doesn't work) to occur first.

Great theory.

Zero: "Slime life began on Earth almost as soon as the crust solidified."

True — a fact that contradicts expectations of classical Darwinism and traditional chemical evolution: i.e., that slow, incremental, trial-and-error processes, over geologically long periods of time, gave rise to self-replicating, living organisms.

Since life appeared on Earth very soon after it cooled, there would not have been a plausibly long enough time for Darwinian processes to result in anything but functionless combinations of various chemicals.

Something other than pure, dumb luck obviously jump-started the process of life, allowing it to skip over the useless combinations of chemicals and hone in on those combinations that result in biologically useful functions.